ed like a man
who had never been given up--nor ever intended giving up, now that life
had given him back the things for which he had a right to fight.

Chapter II

OLD KING COLE

Hennessy was feeding the swans. Sheila O'Leary leaned over the sill of the
diminutive rustic rest-house and watched him with a tired contentment. She
had just come off a neurasthenic case--a week of twenty-four-hour
duty--and she wanted to stretch her cramped sensibilities in the quiet
peace of the little house and invite her soul with a glimpse of Hennessy
and the swans.

All about her the grounds of the sanitarium were astir with its customary
crowd of early-summer-afternoon patients. How those first warm days called
the sick folks out-of-doors and held them there until the last beam of
sunshine had disappeared behind the foremost hill! The tennis-courts were
full; the golf-links were dotted about with spots of color like a cubist
picture; pairs of probationers, arm in arm, were strolling about, enjoying
a comparative leisure; old Madam Courot was at her customary place under
the juniper, watching the sun go down. Three years! Nothing seemed changed
in all that time but the patients--and not all of these, as Madame Courot
silently testified. The pines shook themselves above the rest-house in the
same lazy, vagabond fashion, the sun purpled the far hills and spun the
same yellow haze over the links, the wind brought its habitual afternoon
accompaniment of cow-bells from the sanitarium farm, and Hennessy threw
the last crumb of bread to Brian Boru, the gray swan, as he had done for
the fifteen years Sheila could remember.

She folded her arms across the sill and rested her chin on them. How good
it was to be back at the old San, to settle down to its kindly,
comfortable ways and the peace of its setting after the feverish
restlessness of city hospitals! She remembered what Kipling had said, that
the hill people who came down to the plains were always hungering to get
back to the hills again. That was the way she had felt about it--always a
hunger to come back. For months and months she had thought that she might
forever have to stay in those hospitals, have to make up her mind to the
eternal plains--and then had come her reprieve--she had been called back
to the San and the work she loved best.

Had the place been any other than the sanitarium, and the person any other
than Sheila O'Leary, this would never have happened. For she h